Two Routes to Starting Great Startups: Audience Building and Consulting

Earlier this week I was at SalesLoft’s annual Rainmaker conference and couldn’t help but be in awe of the palpable energy from 1,000+ attendees. People were smiling, talking (go figure with a bunch of sales people attending a sales conference!), and genuinely excited to be there. After reflecting on the event, it reminded me of the early days of SalesLoft at the Atlanta Tech Village.

From the start of SalesLoft, Kyle Porter, the founder/CEO, focused on building a passionate audience of modern sales professionals through public speaking, blogging, and interviewing of sales leaders. Site traffic, email subscribers, and Twitter followers grew tremendously. Only, the company didn’t have a product sales people wanted — the first product was a nice-to-have and not a must have.

Despite limited commercial success with the first product, the passionate audience was there and growing. So, if the product isn’t working but there are a ton of fans of the company, the next step is to ask the them what they want. After many conversations, and more product iterations, sales engagement was identified as the next major opportunity in the sales technology market. Today, SalesLoft has thousands of paying customers and is one of the fastest growing startups in the country.

Now, contrast it to another amazing startup: Terminus. Terminus is the leader in account-based marketing and was founded by Eric Spett. The first year of Terminus was completely focused on consulting for marketers with an eye towards finding a product opportunity and turning it into a SaaS platform. And, that’s exactly what happened.

Consulting is generally a tough way to start a startup because it’s easy to get comfortable with a decent paycheck and not have the time to build a compelling product. Yet, consulting actually works well in that there’s a professional that needs a problem solved, and is willing to pay money to solve it — the perfect environment to do customer discovery. In the case of Terminus, as soon as the market opportunity was clear, the shift was made away from consulting and to full-on product development. Today, thousands of marketers use the Terminus product.

Ultimately, there are many different paths to success. Too often, entrepreneurs get enamored with their initial idea and don’t evolve it fast enough to meet the needs of the market. Building a passionate audience and doing consulting work are two different routes that get close to the customer and help accelerate success.